Pennsylvania’s Eichelberger Brings Business Skills to Legislature

Pennsylvania State Sen. John H. Eichelberger Jr. (R – Blair) is an insurance professional who has achieved success in two highly competitive worlds: insurance agency business and legislative politics.

Eichelberger has been involved in insurance and politics since his college days. As a student, he was working for Republican Party campaigns when a county party chairman who owned an insurance agency offered him a part-time job at his agency.

“The county chairman said, ‘Why don’t you get an insurance license? We will help you with that, and you can work part-time at my insurance agency,'” Eichelberger, 54, told Insurance Journal.

In 2000, Eichelberger founded his own insurance agency, Complete Insurance Services, in Altoona, Penn. He has been a member of the state Senate since 2007.

When asked how he manages his two demanding careers, he offered a simple response. “The answer to that is that I just work all the time, and that’s the truth,” Eichelberger said.

“My wife says I am a workaholic. I don’t know if I am or not, but I’ve always worked a lot. So I am used to working all the time,” he said.

“I am always working either on the senate business or the insurance business; one of the two. You just have to make up your mind that you have very little free time,” said Eichelberger. He said he checks in with his agency’s staff regularly while his staff also call him for business matters that need his attention.

Eichelberger said his background as a business owner and an insurance professional proved to be a valuable asset in the State Capitol.

“With insurance, you have a lot of basic legal knowledge, a lot of problem-solving ability and a lot of very good people skills that are important,” he said.

“I mean, aside from the political end of it, of trying to be nice to people, it’s more than that,” Eichelberger said.

Lawmakers get the headlines every now and then when a piece of legislation passes or when they take a tough stance on issues, but most of what legislators do in government on a daily basis is constituent service work, he observed: “You talk to constituents about their issues, their problems and try to get them solved. And that’s also what we do in the insurance industry every day.”

Eichelberger’s insurance expertise and knowledge are also valued by his fellow legislators. “I do have people ask me questions about insurance in the legislature frequently,” he said.

“There are 50 members in the Pennsylvania senate. And there is a member who is chairman of the banking and insurance committee in the Senate who does financial services work,” Eichelberger explained. “And the only property and casualty guy is me, and I am vice chairman of the banking and insurance committee.”

“I think the experience I had helps me a great deal in the legislature,” he said.

Eichelberger observed that it’s surprising how many issues come up in the legislature that could potentially have an impact on insurance: “The insurance industry is so broad — everything that’s sold, everything that’s financed — it’s the backbone of credit in our country.”

And numerous proposals up come in the Senate that aren’t necessarily insurance legislation but could still have an impact on insurance. “Sometimes you don’t even realize it. We try to look out for that, and people sometimes come to me and ask, ‘Will this be a problem from the insurance perspective?'” he said.

Eichelberger noted that expressing his political stance hasn’t hurt his business. He said he could recall only one instance from his political career where differences in political views led to a customer cancelling a policy.

“It wasn’t a very big account, it was a commercial building. The premium was $1,000 or less,” he recalled.

But the most challenging aspect of being in both insurance business and politics is the difficulty of spending enough time to grow the agency, he said. “Your growth isn’t what it should be compared to other agencies because you don’t have the time. I am not out there soliciting accounts, working the streets and coming up with ad campaigns to get more people in the door. Those things suffer because you don’t have the time to do that.”

On a brighter note, his agency held its own through a soft market, and the agency now has a lot of long-term customers, he added: “And we do our best to service them. That’s our bread and butter.”

“We take care of our long-term customers. If you can do that, you are not losing much business. You are getting some new business and you don’t lose very much, so you are getting ahead.”

For other insurance pros who may be considering a future in politics, Eichelberger advised that they should be prepared to do an awful lot of work. And they should start at the local level — at a town council or a school board – which can be much more manageable time-wise.